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Earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Lief Lin, a PPI policy research fellow, offered dramatic evidence of scholarship’s corruption by progressive bias, with baleful implications for liberal education throughout the nation.
In “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject,” Kahlenberg and Lin argued that “many of the serious scholars who study America – its history, literature and culture – fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.” The authors’ Journal op-ed drew on their report, “The Distortion of American Studies,” for which they reviewed the almost 100 articles that appeared in American Quarterly – a peer-reviewed journal edited by scholars and published by Johns Hopkins University – over three years.
According to Kahlenberg and Lin, American Quarterly, “widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies,” overwhelmingly featured scholarship that advances the outlook of “the academic left” by presenting “a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S.” The authors report that “80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive.” Criticism “focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia.” Some scholarly attacks on America passed over into the absurd: “One essay posited that thermodynamics – the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature – is ‘an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.’”
Kahlenberg and Lin “couldn’t find a single positive article” about America in the prestigious journal from 2022 to 2024. Not one contribution during that three-year period explored “American ingenuity” or examined “why as of 2020 the U.S., representing about 4% of the world’s population, won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the awards’ creation in 1901.” Not one considered “why the U.S. was the first country to land a man on the moon.” Not one dealt with “America’s vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War.” And not one contained a “discussion of why the U.S. is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world.”
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